A young female gay couple was brutally attacked and beaten by two men in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in the morning of 8 August.
The horrific attack took place in the borough of Mustamäe, at a food shack near the Szolnok bus stop.
According to Postimees, the women – 20 and 18 years old – had gone to buy French fries at the food shack in the morning of Sunday, 8 August, when they encountered three men, of whom one felt the necessity to call them “lesbians” and laughed at them.
One of the victims, whom Postimees calls Emma, but admits it’s not her real name, told the newspaper that she got angry at the men and told them to pipe down. According to the newspaper, one of the attackers started to strangle Emma after that.
“He held my neck firmly, my girlfriend tried to push the guy away. /…/ The men started to beat us with their hands and feet. Two of them were beating us and the third one was just looking,” Emma told Postimees. According to the victim, it later emerged that one of the men who attacked her had previously been involved in martial arts, and was over seven feet tall – “like a bear”.
According to Emma, she received three kicks to the head and lost consciousness. “The next moment I remember was when my girlfriend was talking to the emergency services over the phone. Police and an ambulance came; the men who beat us had already left,” she told Postimees.
Emma said her girlfriend had a concussion and both of their heads ached for four days after the beating. She also had nerve ache in her foot so that she couldn’t walk for two days. “We’re very afraid of drunken men now, when we’re out,” she admitted to the newspaper.
According to the police, an investigation has been opened into the brutal attack, Postimees said.
As of 2018, Estonia was the third most homophobic country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, after Turkey and Latvia.
In October 2020, the then interior minister of Estonia and one of the leaders of the populist Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE), Mart Helme, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that his attitude towards gays is “unfriendly” and “Estonian gays could be better off in Sweden” (Helme resigned for different reasons a month later). EKRE is currently the second most popular party in Estonia.
Cover: The fast food shack in the Tallinn borough of Mustamäe, where a young female gay couple was brutally attacked and beaten. Photo: Google Streetview.
